Conventional self-lubricating wear-resistant aluminum-based products include those containing MoS.sub.2, BN or the like added as a solid lubricant in casting aluminum and those produced by extrusion of a mixture of aluminum powder and the solid lubricant.
However, when the solid lubricant is used in a large amount in these conventional techniques, the lubricant can not be uniformly dispersed or it is difficult to consolidate by extrusion. With said problems, the solid lubricant has been used in an amount not exceeding 5%. As a result, conventional wear-resistant aluminum-based products are defective in having poor self-lubricating property.
It is also known to use graphite as a solid lubricant, because of its best lubricity. With a lamellar structure, graphite itself is easily made thinner by extrusion and thus fail to uniformly disperse in the composite material, creating delamination at the boundary between the graphite and the aluminum particles as a matrix with the result that the composite material is imparted a markedly reduced flexure strength and a lower wear resistance.
Aluminum-based composite materials containing a solid lubricant may be typically used, for example, as dry type pump vanes. The flexure strength and lubricity required for such vanes run counter each other in the following respect. An increased amount of lubricant used to improve the lubricity reduces the flexure strength, whereas a decreased amount thereof used to enhance the flexure strength lowers the lubricity. Heretofore no aluminum-based product satisfactory in these two properties has been developed.